"We report a controlled longitudinal study to investigate pre-post changes in brain gray matter concentration attributable to participation in an MBSR [meditation] program. Anatomical MRI images from sixteen healthy, meditation-naïve participants were obtained before and after they underwent the eight-week program. Changes in gray matter concentration were investigated using voxel-based morphometry, and compared to a wait-list control group of 17 individuals. Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the MBSR group compared to the controls. The results suggest that participation in MBSR is associated with changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking."
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet

Utterly amazing from a DMV guy... worth reading if you are interested in analytical philosophy: what the practice of early Wittgenstein might mean in a "conventional" language, to the implications of the private language argument, then back to trying to express the ineffable in ordinary experience. For gaps in meanings, along the way we get to actually encounter Lakoff at his Berkeley home: metaphor is in the idea and can't be wished away with grammar (ontology embedded in language as revealed by the taxonomy behind word units). [Thanks @maitani for showing me this article :-]
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet

Even before _Philosophical Investigations_, Wittgenstein had thought about the verification problem of whether a mentioned color in a conversation was in fact the same to participants, cf. Blue and Brown notebooks. (Only the rotational shift in their color wheels needs to be consistent during the conversation :-) -- but more generally see "trippy" https://www.quora.com/What-ar... So, so much for conciseness, and what were we talking about?
- Adriano

"The Number Sense is an enlightening exploration of the mathematical mind. Describing experiments that show that human infants have a rudimentary number sense, Stanislas Dehaene suggests that this sense is as basic as our perception of color, and that it is wired into the brain. Dehaene shows that it was the invention of symbolic systems of numerals that started us on the climb to higher mathematics. A fascinating look at the crossroads where numbers and neurons intersect, The Number Sense offers an intriguing tour of how the structure of the brain shapes our mathematical abilities, and how our mathematics opens up a window on the human mind." http://www.amazon.com/The-Num...
- Amira

"In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” (…) “Cognition is recognition,” (...) That’s what it means to understand. (...) “Look at your conversations,” he says. “You’ll see over and over again, to your surprise, that this is the process of analogy-making.” Someone says something, which reminds you of something else; you say something, which reminds the other person of something else—that’s a conversation. It couldn’t be more straightforward. But at each step, Hofstadter argues, there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences,...
more...
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence...
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- Amira

That's what On Intelligence, written by Jeff Hawkins is about. How brain decomposes analogies to their bare meaning by employing "invariant representations". Unfortunately, they don't disclose exactly "how" that happens.
- моховик истерики

"The sight of a virtual-reality hand pulsing in time with your heart beat is enough to convince your brain that it’s part of your body, according to new research carried out at the University of Sussex. (...) Neuroscientists and psychologists have long been fascinated by the ‘rubber hand illusion’, a clever trick whereby a fake hand is perceived as part of one’s body if it is stroked simultaneously with one’s real hand. This illusion shows that the brain constructs the experience of ‘having a body’ and that this experience depends on integration of visual and tactile (touch) sensory signals."
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"Until now, little has been known about how the experience of ‘body ownership’ depends on perception of the body’s internal processes, like the heartbeat. Yet perception of the body “from within” is thought to be crucial for emotion and consciousness. (...) The researchers found that the virtual hand was more likely to be experienced as part of a person’s body when the ‘cardio-visual’...
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- Amira

"According to this research, people who spend many hours in the practice room not only process information unusually efficiently, but they also do a superior job of not letting occasional errors derail them. These findings "suggest that playing a musical instrument might improve the ability to monitor our behavior and adjust our responses effectively when needed," (...) In addition, “higher levels of musical practice were also associated with a better engagement of cognitive control processes, as indicated by more efficient error and conflict detection,” the researchers report. Participants who had spent more quality time with their instruments had "a better ability to detect errors and conflicts, and a reduced reactiveness to these detected problems.” (...) In other words, if you hit a wrong note, it’s important to be immediately aware of what you did wrong, but it’s just as important to not hesitate or second-guess yourself. You quickly take stock what happened and move on—a skill...
more...
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

See also: Effects of Music Training on Brain and Cognitive Development in Under-Privileged 3- to 5-Year-Olds - Preliminary Results http://www.dana.org/news...
- Amira

could someone make a chart of years of music education v. jail time spent :-) it's seems rare that a Julliard graduate posts bail.
- Adriano

"Bigger may not always be better, but when it comes to brain processing speed, it appears that size does matter. A new study has revealed that words which refer to big things are processed more quickly by the brain than words for small things. Researchers at the University of Glasgow had previously found that big concrete words – 'ocean', 'dinosaur', 'cathedral' – were read more quickly than small ones such as 'apple', 'parasite' and 'cigarette'. Now they have discovered that abstract words which are thought of as big – 'greed', 'genius', 'paradise' – are also processed faster than concepts considered to be small such as 'haste', 'polite' and 'intimate'."
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"Doctored image depicting a giant robot assisting socialist revolutionaries in 1917 was accidentally used in a history exam. It is the second year in a row the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has been forced to apologise following debacles in the end-of-year exams. Purnell said while some students didn't notice the robot, others wasted time trying to work it out: ''One student suggested it was a statue of Alexander Kerensky, head of the Mensheviks. Another student thought it was the battleship Aurora - it's clear several students were thrown by it.''" cf. CogSci experiment where gorilla image implanted in x-rays was not noticed by expert radiologists :-)
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet

In his Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, sec. 6) David Hume suggested that the idea of an enduring discoverable self was unfounded. Introspection revealed "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." Many people have noticed the similarity between Hume's position here and Buddhist discussion of the self. Listen also to podcast: http://traffic.libsyn.com/philoso... Gopnik is a psychology professor at Berkeley.
- Adriano

"We sought to demonstrate that it is possible to send information extracted from one brain directly to another brain, allowing the first subject to cause a desired response in the second subject through direct brain-to-brain communication. A task was designed such that the two subjects could cooperatively solve the task by transmitting a meaningful signal from one brain to the other." -- Read more: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao...
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. (...) “The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain...
more...
- Amira

"[N]early all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. (...) “It’s a very counterintuitive finding — there have been some interesting reactions from musicians,” Tsay said. “What this suggests is that there may be a way that visual information is prioritized over information from other modalities. In this case, it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.” Tsay herself has performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and said it was her experience in classical music competitions that piqued her interest in visual vs. audio information. (...) People had a lower chance of identifying the eventual winner if they only listened to the sound,” Tsay said. “People who just had the video — even without the sound — had surprisingly high rates of selecting the actual winner. Even with...
more...
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

I'm thinking the problem is more in the idea that there can be single winner, that's there's a one quality that defines a winning performance. It would be more realistic to say there's a family of performers that are defined by their performance being of a winning quality.
- Todd Hoff

What is something worth? A very basic question which has many complicated answers. Friedman, a Nobel prize winning economist, shares a short story without any mathematical equations which illustrates the point that valuation is an emergent property of collective beliefs. Even gold in central bank vaults is like that huge stone shown in the photograph above.
- Adriano

"Music is usedto regulatemoodand arousal in everyday life and to promote physical and psychological health and well-being in clinical settings. However, scientiﬁc inquiry into the neurochemical effects of music is still in its infancy. In this review, we evaluate the evidence that music improves health and well-being through the engagement of neurochemical systems for (i) reward, motivation, and pleasure; (ii) stress and arousal; (iii) immunity; and (iv) social afﬁliation. We discuss the limitations of these studies and outline novel approaches for integration of conceptual and technological advances from the ﬁelds of music cognition and social neuroscience into studies of the neurochemistry of music."
- Amira

"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” (...). Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. Those can easily be more mistaken than the testimony of the passing hobo. (...) [Popper]: [A]ll ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ (...) Popper’s answer is: We can hope to detect and eliminate error if we set up traditions of criticism—substantive criticism, directed at the content of ideas, not their sources, and directed at whether they solve the problems that they purport to solve. (...) Democracy, in this conception, is not a system for enforcing obedience to the authority of the majority. In the bigger picture, it is...
more...
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"Fallibilism, correctly understood, implies the possibility, not the impossibility, of knowledge, because the very concept of error, if taken seriously, implies that truth exists and can be found. The inherent limitation on human reason, that it can never find solid foundations for ideas, does not constitute any sort of limit on the creation of objective knowledge nor, therefore, on...
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- Amira

"Scientists -- and parents -- have long wondered why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. As all parents know, no matter how momentous an event is in a toddler’s life, the memory soon drifts away and within months there isn’t even a wisp of it left. Now a new study shows that “infantile amnesia” may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory. (...) Frankland suspected that memories actually got filed away into long-term storage, but that the hippocampus lost track of where they’d been stacked during the rapid growth phase that takes place in the first few years of life."
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"As the hippocampus matures, huge numbers of new neurons come on line and need to be hooked into existing circuits, he says. The most likely scenario is that in all that restructuring, the brain “forgets” where it stored the memories. As the expansion slows down, the brain can better keep track of where everything is filed away – so long-term memory gets better as youngsters get older....
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- Amira

I always thought it was because of synaptic pruning but the effect is the same.
- Victor Ganata
from iPhone

Why news is to the mind, what sugar is to the body... MUST READ, concentrate if you must :-) then diet. I'm starting today. Dobelli's paper articulates how I've been feeling lately (bloated), especially with yummy Android apps like Flipboard, Pulse, Currents, and Bloomberg. His arguments are reasonable and perceptive. \\ The German version is here: http://dobelli.com/... includes FAQS in English.
- Adriano

So true... This is why lately I went back to the old habit of reading more books rather than newspapers.
- Amira

Abstract: "In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions."
- Amira

"Technology has changed the speed and the scope of social influence and has really transformed our realities. (...) I see that most of our learning is by social modeling and through indirect experiences. Errors can be very costly and you can’t afford to develop our values, our competences, our political systems, our religious systems through trial and error. Modeling shortcuts this process. (…) With new technologies, we’re essentially transcending our physical environment and more and more of our values and attitudes and behavior are now shaped in the symbolic environment – the symbolic environment is the big one rather than the actual one. The changes are so rapid that there are more and more areas of life now in which the cyber world is really essential. One model can affect millions of people worldwide, it can shape their experiences and behaviors. We don’t have to rely on trial and error. (...)"
- Amira
from Bookmarklet

"The revolutionary tendency of technology has increased our sense of agency. If I have access to all global knowledge, I would have fantastic capacities to educate myself. (…) The important thing in psychology is that we need a theory of human agency, rather than arguing that we’re controlled by neural networks. In every aspect of our lives we now have a greater capacity for exercicing agency."
- Amira

We assume that aggression is inbred, but some societies are remarkably pacifistic. And we can also see large variations within a society. But the most striking example might be the transformation from warrior societies into peaceful societies. Switzerland is one example. Sweden is another: Those vikings were out mugging everyone and people would pray for protection:
- Elestirel Gunluk

Napolean CHAGNON :: Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (2013) . ["one of the most interesting anthropology books I have ever read"] - http://online.wsj.com/article...

"Alpha males almost invariably acquire authority by killing their enemies—think of the generals that Americans have elevated to the presidency. The general's ability to order people around is, paradoxically, a first step "in the direction of law." Yanomamö men fought over women and that this male conflict was not only the fundamental cause of war in simple societies but "the most important single force in shaping the evolution of political society in our species." [T]hese people are not "pure" or "pristine"; they are dispossessed. Their existence in small bands is reflective not of humankind's ancient past but of a shattered society that has preserved its liberty by retreat."
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet

Jonah LEHRER resigns from The New Yorker :: "The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers." (30 July 2012) - http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012...

"Lehrer executed one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds, one that on Monday cost him his prestigious post at the magazine and his status as one of the most promising, visible and well-paid writers in the business. An article in Tablet magazine revealed that in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Lehrer had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, one of the most closely studied musicians alive. Only last month, Mr. Lehrer had publicly apologized for taking some of his previous work from The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications and recycling it in blog posts for The New Yorker, acts of recycling that his editor called “a mistake.” By Monday, when the Tablet article was published online, both The New Yorker and Mr. Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, made it clear that they had lost patience with him."
- Adriano
from Bookmarklet

Deception ratchet: "The whole style of writing popular amongst the "Big Idea" crowd pushes for errors of omission in favor of a tight story. This is such a minor sin--one for which you almost certainly cannot be caught--that the allure to commit the lie probably overwhelms any inner voice of caution. But once you take that first deceptive step, you are statistically more likely to be...
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- Adriano

That apology was a wonderful letter (to his future daughter), and quotes the real Bob Dylan: “She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all.” \\ Lehrer is a very good writer, and I wish he will continue his work. He examined himself as a case study in self-blindness -- Bravo!
- Adriano